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CONFESSING to REMORSE ABOUT the EVILS of APARTHEID: the DUTCH REFORMED CHURCH in the NINETEEN-EIGHTIES T. Dunbar Moodie, Emerit

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CONFESSING to REMORSE ABOUT the EVILS of APARTHEID: the DUTCH REFORMED CHURCH in the NINETEEN-EIGHTIES T. Dunbar Moodie, Emerit CONFESSING TO REMORSE ABOUT THE EVILS OF APARTHEID: THE DUTCH REFORMED CHURCH IN THE NINETEEN-EIGHTIES T. Dunbar Moodie, Emeritus Professor, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, also Research Associate, Society, Work and Development Institute (SWOP), University of the Witwatersrand Abstract: The transition in South Africa from apartheid to a constitutional democracy with equal rights for all has been described and celebrated in innumerable accounts. The best overview is probably Patti Waldmeir’s, Anatomy of a Miracle. What is missing from such stories, however, at least in English, is careful discussion of the role in the transformation process played by the Dutch Reformed churches (and other Afrikaner cultural organizations) in preparing Afrikaners for transition to democracy. The purpose of this paper is to examine theological debates and political struggles within the majority Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk (NGK) that led to public confession in 1990 of remorse about the evils of apartheid. The most fundamental change, however, came earlier, at the 1986 General Synod, well before F.W. de Klerk’s 1989 political leap forward. The paper seeks to describe personal, intellectual, cultural and political processes within the church that brought about this institutional transformation. The best book in English on change through the late 1970s and early 1980s in the NGK (the majority Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa with around 80% of white Afrikaans- speaking reformed church-goers) remains Apartheid, Change and the NG Kerk, by J.H.P. Serfontein.1 Based on years of extensive interviews with church people, it contains many appendices with translations of important documents as well as an admirable effort to situate church debates within political developments from 1978 to 1982. Despite evidence of critical dissent in the NGK, however, Serfontein (1982:203) ends on a despondent note: 1 Bosch, 1985 provides a brief overview in English for the period before 1985. See also Kinghorn, 1997, which operates, however, with the rather vague notion of “modernization” as a primary explanatory principle. There are two rather anodyne accounts in Afrikaans, Guam 1997 and Du Toit, et al 2004, that deal with the entire period from 1960 to 1994. Both cite Serfontein as a source. The closest equivalent to Serfontein in Afrikaans is Kinghorn 1986. I have relied heavily for this paper on three Afrikaans sources, Botha 1986, Jonker 1998, and Williams 2006. I am grateful in turn to Rob Gordon, Alex Mouton and Amie van Wyk respectively, who each suggested one of these works. The essays in Weisse & Anthonissen 2004 are provocative but somewhat piecemeal. 1 If the NGK’s Broederbond2 leadership at its general synod in 1982 rejects the ideas expressed in the Open Letter of 123 white ministers, if they reject one non-racial NGK, if they continue unquestioning support for the apartheid policies of the government and if they continue blessing the NP [the dominant National Party] and the CP [the recent breakaway Conservative Party led by NG minister, Andries Treurnicht] as the vehicles of Afrikaner Nationalism, then the chances of a negotiated peaceful settlement in South Africa are nil, and the NGK will have failed in its Biblical mission to reconcile black and white in South Africa. Professor Johan Heyns, a theologian from Pretoria University, Serfontein added (1982:202), “is probably the most important personality, and the key figure in the NGK, regardless of his official position. He is needed by both the opposing factions… he is a barometer of the chances of reform inside the NGK.” The 1982 general synod of the white NGK, meeting in October, seemed to confirm Serfontein’s pessimism. It rejected every single one of the reforms listed as essential by Serfontein in the quotation above. Moreover, Johan Heyns was removed from virtually every position of authority within the church. Rampant conservative opinion swept over virtually every vote in the Synod. Four years later however, at the NGK general synod in 1986, there was an extraordinary turnaround. Heyns was elected moderator of the white church, which adopted a new statement on social policy, Church and Society (C&S), declaring that “membership of the Dutch Reformed Church is open,” and thus “public worship and other gatherings” were “open to all visitors who desire to listen to the Word in fellowship with other believers.” (C&S:273) A relatively small group of conservative clergy and congregations broke away from the NGK in disgust to form the Afrikaans Protestant Church (APK). In 1990, nonetheless, Church and Society was amended to include a more explicit condemnation of apartheid, stating: The right and freedom to remain true to one’s own cultural heritage, was extended to become a political ideology of apartheid as a system for the protection of the white minority’s own interests to the detriment of others. Love for one’s own often took the shape of racism…. [T]he church made the error of allowing forced separation and division of peoples in its own circle to be considered a biblical imperative. The Dutch Reformed Church should have distanced itself much earlier from this view and admits and confesses its neglect…. Apartheid began to function in such a way that the largest 2 The Afrikaner Broederbond was an elite Afrikaner secret society to which virtually all eminent males, churchmen as well as politicians and businessmen, belonged. 2 part of the population of the country experienced it as an oppressive system which through the forced separation of peoples was in reality favoring one group wrongfully above the others. In this way the human dignity of one’s fellowman became adversely affected and was in conflict with the principles of love and righteousness. Any system which in practice functions in this way, is unacceptable in the light of Scripture and Christian conscience and must be rejected as sinful. (C&S 1990:282-5) Shortly thereafter, on the basis of this statement, at an ecumenical consultation in Rustenberg, Willie Jonker, a Stellenbosch University theology professor who had been asked to deliver a keynote address, inserted ad lib into his speech the following confession: I confess before you and before the Lord, not only my own sin and guilt and my personal responsibility for the political, social, economic and structural wrongs that have been done to many of you, the results of which you and our whole country are still suffering from, but vicariously I dare also to do that in the name of the DRC [NGK] of which I am a member, and for the Afrikaner people as a whole. I have the liberty to do just that, because the DRC at its latest synod has declared apartheid a sin and confessed its own guilt of negligence in not warning against it and distancing itself from it long ago. (Van der Merwe 2014:95) In but eight years since Hennie Serfontein’s despondent conclusion, based as it indeed was on solid grounds, the NGK seemed to have come full circle. How had it done so and what were the implications for the South African social and political landscape? This was indeed a period of verligte (enlightened) “reform” in politics. Was the church simply following political trends?3 What were the theological debates that led to this transformation? And was it indeed as much of a transformation as it needed to be? Conservative Afrikaners were indeed deeply disturbed by the new developments. The church after all had split. In 1994, Heyns was assassinated, shot through the head with a single shot from a high-powered rifle while playing cards with his grandchildren in his own sitting room. Serfontein’s “barometer” had taken its final horrific read.4 Accolades flowed in to his wife and family. 3 I should perhaps note that a similar transformation during the same period had also taken place in the Broederbond. I deal with this aspect in Moodie (2017). The more general point to be taken is simple. It is essential to address cultural and religious as well economic and political factors in order to understand the South African transition to democracy. 4 It is still not clear who killed Heyns, or why. My own very tentative opinion may be found in context at footnote 56. 3 Nonetheless, a question remains about the NGK in the new South Africa. Have apartheid assumptions indeed been abandoned by the church? That is a more complicated story than can be fully addressed here and the outcome remains ambiguous, but there is no question that the NGK was at the forefront of Afrikaner’s transition from apartheid, even as it had been very much present at its creation. This paper seeks to set out the social and intellectual processes involved. Origins of racial apartheid in NGK mission policy Probably the best account in English of the development of apartheid theory is to be found in Hermann Giliomee’s (2003) chapter “The Making of a Radical Survival Plan.”5 He makes quite clear that the primary principles of separate development practice and theory arose from missionary concerns. The evangelical thrust of NGK missionary zeal was largely aimed outside the borders of South Africa, as far north as Kenya and the Sudan but most powerfully in what became Zimbabwe, Malawi and Zambia. There was no need to justify separate NG synods in such cases, although some were inclined to cite Warneck, the great German missiologist who insisted that mission work should develop indigenous versions of Christian theology appropriate to the various cultures of the converted. Matters were however rather more difficult in the Cape, however. where, because of white racial aversion to mixed worship, mission work by the NGK had long established racially separate congregations – and indeed, eventually, a separate “mission” synod – for “coloured”6 congregants.
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